Phantom
by whydowefall
Summary: 'He imagines that he tastes of cigarette ashes and cheap, airplane liquor. He imagines that she tastes like chocolate and absence.'


**Title:** Phantom

**Rating:** R

**Fandom:** LOST

**Summary:** 'He imagines that he tastes of cigarette ashes and cheap, airplane liquor. He imagines that she tastes like chocolate and absence.'

**Pairing:** Sawyer/Kate

**Warnings:** Spoilers for 'Deus Ex Machina'

**Disclaimer:** These characters are not mine. J.J. owns them, and I am not making any money off of them.

**Phantom**

He imagines that he tastes of cigarette ashes and cheap, airplane liquor.

He imagines that she tastes like chocolate and absence.

Sometimes, when Sawyer dreams on the island, it's in black and white, where the only color is blood. And this blood isn't red, either, it's more of an eggplant, a deep, almost purple red. In these dreams, people smell like death, no matter how tight he tries to pinch his nose closed, and their death is like burning. Just like Jack said.

Just like Jack said.

Jack almost never dies in his dreams. Instead, he sits at the tops of trees and watches in silence. Jack's face is carved from stone and his silence is unnerving when Sawyer blindly tries to get away from the blood and the burning. The other inhabitants of the island don't notice that they're on fire, a bright, white fire, except for Kate.

Kate knows, and she doesn't say a word to him.

When he wakes up, chest rising and falling in a steady pulse of _now now now_, he looks around. Nothing in his campsite is ever different from when he fell asleep, and Sawyer's never quite sure why he was dreaming about Kate again.

She was more like him than any other person on the island. She knew what it was like to hold a gun like you would hold a lover, and that scared him, but not that much. If there was something that really scared him, it was the thought of smelling fire and seeing his reflection in her eyes where she said nothing but burned away slow.

Always slow, because on the island, there was too much time to take things fast.

He imagines that she tastes like chocolate for two reasons, though one didn't count. The only woman he's ever loved, she tasted like oranges, constantly like citrus, and he wants deep tastes with Kate. He wants to taste her skin and not taste the salt that would cling there, and to instead taste rich, dark chocolate and fall away in that.

Fall away dark into the ocean, or not at all.

She also accepted chocolate in return for secrets, or for information that should have been secret, so he could vividly picture her unwrapping each individual piece, playing with the golden foil wrapper as the chocolate melted on her tounge.

There was no way of knowing which didn't count, at least to him.

When the dreams weren't in black and white, they were about times back home. Maybe about times in the past, or maybe what might happen in the future, but he was always home. Home was a kitchen with red and white checked curtains and brown tiles on the floor, and good food in the oven always. Home was with a dark-haired girl who never turned around, who never took off her green apron, and who never, ever cried.

Maybe Kate would cry for him if he asked her to.

Maybe he just wants to be reminded that the island was real.

When they had kissed, deep and long and with urgency that had never gone away, even after all these weeks, she hadn't tasted like anything at all. He had been too focused, too focused on pressing his tongue into her mouth and feeling her fight back and win as she pulled away, to notice a taste.

So when they kiss again, deep and long and in the dead of night, waves lapping at their ankles and feet sinking into the swirling sands, he looks for a taste.

Still there was none.

But it wasn't even the taste of absence, because he knew what that was like, too, and she wasn't it. Kate's fingers wrapped in his hair, tugging him ever closer and against her, this wasn't absence.

She was just tasteless, or maybe she was simply something he had never tasted before.

The dreams didn't intensify when she slept pressed tight against him, warm and good, but they did become more real. He could smell not only the smells of burning flesh wash over him in waves as he staggered along, Jack at the top of every tree and always, always, watching.

He also smells what Kate tasted like, and it scares him.

Still no name to it, still no explanation to ease him that she was indeed in his arms. Sawyer asks her once, lying out on the beach in the sun, late in the month after the month that they should have been rescued in, what the worst thing she had ever tasted was.

Kate explains it over and over to him as he nips his teeth at the skin where her neck meets her shoulder, leaving dark, round marks. She tells him that it was blood, and she holds him tight as he thrust deep into her that night.

Jack had said that it wasn't a tumor because there was no smell. Jack hadn't explained what happened when it was only phantom odors in his dreams, and he hadn't explained what happened when Kate tasted like nothing.

Maybe Sawyer was only dreaming he would die. Maybe he would live forever, like all of them would live forever on the island.

He imagines that she tastes like chocolate and absence, and she doesn't.


End file.
